The Sight Of Sights

When you look at something carefully, the reality of that image is imprinted on you.

I’m headed home. And what do I see? An orange peel thrown as if deliberately at my feet. I know it’s an orange peel, because I know what a brightly colored orange looks like, even if it’s lightly covered with snow. Just keep an eye on it in time, because you have so much to see around it, so much truth hidden in fragments of reality that, bizarrely, seems to open another world ahead.

And what is an orange peel? It is a world of life translated into an experience of bold, yet delicate color, taken to a vintage-retro area, expressed by an accentuated certainty regarding the aesthetic sense.

I lift it from the ground, clear it of snow. The shape of the orange peel, in the shape of a circle resembling a parable or dome, and which if it had been transposed into the drawing would have turned into a protective, calming and tonic halo of light, revealing a certain state of reverie, invites us to the rich imaginary world of artists. A certain meaning places the orange peel in a sphere of new relations between color and perception, between emotion and the aroma of a nostalgic perfume.

Such an approach of form and color would present a curious analogy, in conception and bill, in the way in which Salvador Dali rendered the passage of time, which I also feel in one way or another, more acute or slower.

The orange peel seems to be covered by a mystery, a hidden and inaccessible reality, automatically rendered in a logical exposition made according to the most natural rules of a moment of escape from the picture of a changing society, in an “open plan” area in which the diffusion and the few accents of light focus here and there on geometric figures specific to the Tuareg culture. Looking at it simultaneously affects both the spirit and the technique of producing images on a flat surface, usually paper, through graphic signs that serve to distinguish minimalism within essentialism.

Can you change the outcome of the impact you have on the creative process, through an effort of the self to manifest itself as an effect of “transparency” against the background of a static image?

Voluntary simplicity is the heart of the painting, as is the state of the orange peel when viewed through a Mannerist window, or through an existential filter that unifies everything in a warmer hue, declining in countless hues and shades of yellow, orange and pink. And if I looked at it through an ocean whose lens cuts out strips of reality and, after enlarging them, bringing them closer for a moment to other aspects of the environment, I would get a theme full of sensitivity and lyricism.

If I look at it more closely, as the artist looks at his work in progress, combining the parts of a whole, I could give back the calm glow of an end-of-winter painting in which the glitter of something golden could be seen from a distance. Here my task is to render an element of nature which, expressed by the warm affection of a flat figure, or of a three-dimensional body in recursions, can trigger a “re-paint” directly or indirectly. And not only that. The orange peel should convey a lot of emotion, be able to animate and completely change the appearance of a decor capable of inducing a mood of melancholically.

But no matter how abandoned I am in the face of the news of the moment and the daily life so diverse, the orange peel gives me, beyond the retina of the eyes where I find myself in a temporal point, an image probably identical, but not one of identity, of the cohesive, elevated self endowed with sufficient empathic reflection.

Can you increase the vitality of a static image to develop a more realistic view of the transition from the certainties of an easy-to-understand present to the level of development of a self-revelation experience?

Yes, I could retain in my mind for a long time the idea of using an orange peel to feed and express my authentic self through a sort of false mystery, by means of an algebra of images. But until the orange peel is outlined in a simple drawing in which even the slightest accents of admiration for the height of expression become visible, I will not be able to get rid of the vivid feeling of being tied to someone or something.

My own self is a reflection of the creative attitude, not just a free contemplation of beauty, along a gaze that slides from the depths of the soul in the direction of a mirror effect (in which the reflective plane is chosen arbitrarily).

I, who know how to appreciate any element of nature, like no one else, I who can raise an orange peel to the rank of muse through the intrinsic importance it exudes to my self, depending on the interpretation I give to its form and presence In a pencil shaded setting, I can appreciate everything around me at its true value. In fact, the spiritual unity of a thing lies in the way the artist manages to restore that inexhaustible vitality that only human beings possess, without being forced to resort to a “retelling” by arranging images of nature in an unnatural order.

Here the focus is on the possibility of understanding an image that becomes double, on the one hand symbol, on the other personification. The orange peel, later colored in a three-dimensional space and viewed as an object with flat faces, two visible and two seen through transparency or diffusion, brings to the artist’s attention the undeniable merit of probing his Ego through a metamorphosis: “you become the result of what you create”.

The experience of self-development actually involves a reporting of the experience of looking at the elaboration of a subjective image whose content is defined by a question: “What is unique and is found in all?”

The Sight Of Sights reflects the artist’s ability to relate his Ego to the meaning attributed to an image in the foreground of which is a seemingly insignificant thing. In this way, I remember Marcus Aurelius who urged every man to define and describe the object whose image appears to him at the level of the soul:

“Always formulate the definition and a description of the object whose origin operated on your representative capacity, so that you realize what it is, in its empty substance, in its whole or in all its aspects, and indicate to it, within itself, its own name and the name of the elements of which it is composed and which are to be decomposed.”